27th July 2018 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Tutoring properly obviously has to be at the heart of every tutor’s lessons. Trying to follow Tutoring Standards’ pedagogy is something we remind our tutors about at every opportunity. However, the last paragraph briefly mentions tutoring skills which are important not to overlook.
It’s understandable why the more human, soft skills aren’t pushed more strongly; the idea is to promote the mechanics of tuition as succinctly as possible, and make sure that tutors practise and remember them. Of course, no tutor or student is a robot, and it would be foolish to claim that the atmosphere a tutor creates has no effect on how well a student learns.
So much about the success of a one-to-one lesson revolves around the student’s emotional state and how receptive they are to think about the tutor’s questions and try to understand the ideas. While we all hope that students can remain calm and focussed during a lesson, that doesn’t always happen, and there are lots of things a tutor can do to help.
Obviously being calm yourself helps everyone around you to feel more comfortable. Of course, when someone begins tutoring, that can be difficult, and more experienced tutors tend to be better at appearing relaxed because a face-to-face lesson is not an unusual situation. The most important thing is to try and help the student not to feel ‘tested’, not to feel as though the tutor will be disappointed or frustrated if they struggle to answer a question.
It might sound obvious, but a tutor-student relationship is very different from that of a classroom teacher. Helping others around you to feel relaxed and comfortable really helps them to be in the right frame of mind to learn.